Brave, Not Perfect. Reshma Saujani

try to explain it as one thing on the continuum, but parents are understandably nervous in this day and age. It’s hard trying to encourage them to let their daughters fail,” she says.

      It’s deep stuff, this urge to protect and shield girls from disappointment and pain. Even more profound are the long-term effects, which many of us feel today as grown women. If we think about how horrified we are by the idea of failing, whether it’s a serious rejection or a little mistake that we ruminate over for days, we can see how avoiding disappointment in our early life sliced into our resilience. We just didn’t get the practice we needed to give us the bounceback that life demands. The good news here is that it’s never too late. We can build resilience through bravery, and in later chapters, I’ll show you how.

       Perfection or Bust

      When girls first walk into our Girls Who Code program, we immediately see their fear of not getting it right on full display. Every teacher in our program tells the same story.

      At some point during the early lessons, a girl will call her over and say she is stuck. The teacher will look at her screen and the girl’s text editor will be blank. If the teacher didn’t know any better, she’d think her student had spent the past twenty minutes just staring at the screen.

      But if she presses “undo” a few times, she’ll see that her student wrote code and deleted it. The student tried. She came close. But she didn’t get it exactly right. Instead of showing the progress she made, she’d rather show nothing at all.

      Perfection or bust.

      Dr. Meredith Grossman is a psychologist on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. With its concentration of highly competitive private schools, it is arguably the high-pressure-school capital of the world. She works with many girls to help them manage anxiety, and I asked her to tell me a little about what she sees on a daily basis.

      “What’s fascinating is the extreme amount of work they put into everything, and how much they underestimate their performance,” she said. “I work with a lot of highly intelligent girls, and the quality of their writing is superior to what most adults can produce. But I constantly hear, ‘I couldn’t possibly turn that in.’ They write and rewrite five times. They’d rather ask for an extension than turn something in they think isn’t perfect.”

      As soon as one paragraph or paper is polished to perfection, it’s on to the next. There’s no break in the cycle because it’s rare that their extreme efforts don’t pay off. “Perfection begets more perfection,” Meredith explained. “Every time a student overstudies or rewrites something five times and gets a good grade, it gets reinforced that she needs to do that again to succeed.”

      For every girl who writes and rewrites her papers until she’s bleary-eyed, there’s a woman who reads (and rereads, and rereads . . .) an email, report, or even a simple birthday card before sending it to make sure it hits precisely the right note, or spends weeks planning the ideal dinner party or a family trip to make everyone happy, or changes her outfit six times before leaving the house. We revise, rework, and refine to get things just right, often to a point of obsession or frustration that takes us out of the game.

      Whether I’m speaking at a private school in New York City or at a community center in Scranton, Pennsylvania, I ask the girls in the audience the same question: “How many of you strive to be perfect?” Almost without exception, 99 percent of the hands in the room shoot up. Not with embarrassment—with smiles. They know they’re trying to be perfect and are proud of it! They’re rewarded for that behavior so they see it as a virtue. We heap praise on our girls for getting good grades, being well behaved and well liked, and for being good listeners, polite, cooperative, and all the other qualities that earn them gold stars on their report cards. We tell them that they’re smart and talented, pretty and popular. They respond to these messages positively and wear them like a badge of honor. Is it any wonder that they see perfection as the only acceptable option?

      In perfect-girl world, being judged harshly by their peers is the ultimate mortification; many girls and young women told me they won’t post pictures on social media that are anything short of perfectly posed and meticulously edited. They’ll take and retake a picture dozens of times to make sure it’s flattering. One seventeen-year-old who suffers from a mild case of scleroderma, an autoimmune disease that caused a small patch of hardened skin on her forehead, admitted that she will anxiously spend up to an hour trying to take the perfectly arranged selfie in which her “patch” is 100 percent concealed by her long bangs. To make matters even more agonizing, the new thing is to go in the complete opposite direction and post “no filter” photos, which becomes a whole other level of pressure to capture that selfie that’s “perfectly imperfect” without filters.

      Girls will freely admit that they’re afraid to blemish their records, so they don’t take classes they aren’t certain they can get a high grade in—no matter how interested they are in the subject. This continues through college, as they automatically close doors to career paths they could potentially love. It’s not a coincidence that male economics majors outnumber women three to one; research done by Harvard economics professor Claudia Goldin revealed that women who earn B’s in introductory economics are far more likely to switch majors than those who earn A’s (while their male counterparts stick with it, B’s be damned).

      Appearing stupid is a huge concern. In perfect-girl world, being judged harshly by one’s peers is the ultimate mortification; and it’s been shown to be one of the main barriers girls face when they think about doing anything brave. For Destiny, math had always been a challenge. But the boys in her middle school made her feel far worse about it. “I’d be up at the board for a long time trying to work out a problem, and they’d say something like, ‘You’re so dumb,’ or they’d laugh, and I’d get all flustered. It made me not even want to try to do math anymore. Why put all this effort in, just to get it wrong, and get yelled at by the boys?”

      I know how she feels. When I was in law school at Yale, I remember sitting in my constitutional law class wanting desperately to contribute but feeling too intimidated. I mean, I was a girl from Schaumburg, Illinois, who was one of the first in my community to go on to an Ivy League grad school. All my classmates seemed so smart and impeccably articulate, and I didn’t want to seem stupid in comparison. So I’d write out in my notebook exactly what I wanted to say, then I’d rewrite it three, four, a dozen times. By the time I worked up the courage to raise my hand, class was usually over.

      Of course, the fears of not measuring up extend beyond the classroom. Amanda wanted to try lacrosse in high school but didn’t because she’s “not athletic.” She summed up in two sentences a familiar sentiment I heard expressed in so many different varieties: “I just felt like if I couldn’t do it well, I didn’t want to do it at all.”

      It’s important to understand that for girls, failure is defined as anything that is less than the proverbial A+. It’s black and white: you either totally rock or totally suck. To them, failure isn’t just painful—it’s colossal, devastating, and to be avoided at all costs. So if they can’t rock it, they skip it.

       The Fixed Mindset

      When Amanda declared that she didn’t dare try lacrosse, she fell victim to a type of thinking that Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck famously outlined in her brilliant book Mindset. In a nutshell, Dweck identified two different belief systems about ability and intelligence.

      The first is a fixed mindset. A person with a fixed mind-set believes that their abilities are innate and unchangeable. You’re either smart or you aren’t, talented or untalented, athletic or not at all, and there’s not much you can do about it. The other is a growth mindset, which is based on the belief that abilities can be developed and cultivated through effort. Regardless of whatever natural level of ability or talent you are born with, you can learn skills and improve.

      These are the hallmarks of a fixed mindset:

       • An urgency to prove oneself again and again.